Cinnamon 6 will start flirting with Wayland, but Linux Mint will remain on X11 by default

The October newsletter Linux Mint has arrived before October leaves. Usually, Clem Lefebvre publishes them every month, but this time it was not like that. And he has told us some interesting things, starting with "Romeo" who is the equivalent of Sid from Debian: they both break things, one toys and the other hearts. And since there is a possibility that they may destroy something, they are the names used in unstable branches.

In short, all versions of Linux Mint have a girl's name, and each release has its own Romeo that could break her heart. Unstable releases are not available to the public until the beta is launched, but you can activate the option to receive some news from software sources, in the tab where "romeo" appears in parentheses.

Linux Mint will give more access to its "Unstable" software

The new thing is that they will use Romeo to deliver new features and changes you are working on the Mint team to prepare the next version. This will allow the early adopters or alpha testers run unstable versions of Cinnamon, Xapps, Mint tools and so on without having to compile it. On the other hand, it will replace the "Unstable" repository.

The other most interesting point is that They've started talking about Wayland. They have already started the work to adopt it, but Linux Mint will remain on X11 for quite some time. The only clear thing is that it will not land this year, nor in v22.x next year, but they intend to be prepared for when the time comes.

Cinnamon 6.0 It will be available before Linux Mint 21.3 at the end of 2023, and will add support for experimental Wayland. Something like what KDE offers right now, with the difference that, in theory, the Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint will offer the option to use Wayland from the login screen without having to install the package separately.

Its use will not be recommended for production equipment, but the possibility will exist.

other developments

Hypnotix has received new features and will arrive with Linux Mint 21.3: channels can be saved in favorites and the program now uses libmpv which in turn is based on yt-dlp to display content from YouTube channels.

Most of these changes will arrive this Christmas in Linux Mint 21.3.